


Keep Your Head Up, Hold Your Head Up

by OrchardsinSnow



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Afterlife Shenanigans, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brakebills (The Magicians), Canon compliant except for the part about Alice and Q getting back together which I basically ignore, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, Love, M/M, Magic, Post-Canon, Professor Waugh, Sexual Content, Strong enough to make a person bring himself back from the dead, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 09:57:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20928344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrchardsinSnow/pseuds/OrchardsinSnow
Summary: There was a certain tree he loved, in a quiet way, in his childhood—a tree he one night watched burn to ash as he crouched helpless, barefoot and trembling, pajama pants whipping in the wind, just beyond the reach of licking flames. Looking back now, he remembers understanding for the first time that loving something in secret means, later, suffering in secret.A story about Eliot, after. Six vignettes.





	Keep Your Head Up, Hold Your Head Up

**Author's Note:**

> Begins after a forward jump to Eliot in 2025, then visits Eliot in 2019, 2021, 2023, and then two different instances in 2025, including the day we started with. 
> 
> Book fans: Plum is in this! And Wharton! (Otherwise it has nothing to do with the books). 
> 
> I got this idea for a Professor Waugh fic after seeing Hale Appleman post a selfie on Instagram in Eliot garb and where the lighting makes his hair look gray. It took a moody turn, because of course.

  1. ** NOVEMBER 2025 (TODAY)**

On Thursdays, Eliot allows himself a glass of 40-year-old tawny port while he tidies his lab. Thursdays are his Fridays, the Brakebills schedule being what it is, and Tuesdays are his Mondays. He has a four-day weekend every week.

About once per month, he spends his long weekends with High King Margo and sometimes Fresh Prince Josh in Fillory, riding horses through the shallow surf of the Ochre Sea or lounging in the shade of the Wormwood Grove with a picnic hamper full of tiny sandwiches and fizzy sodas, cuddling some very accommodating talking cats who are almost as devoted to Margo as he is. It’s pleasant.

Fillory isn’t his kingdom anymore, but Margo is there, and that’s plenty. It’s a cloudless and temperate escape, something he cherishes especially now that the Brakebills weather enchantments are approximating a biting, rainy late fall.

He isn’t going to Fillory this weekend, though. This weekend he has plans to be in Manhattan, where for the first time in six years he has agreed to go on a date. Not a semi-anonymous hookup with a stranger but a proper date, with an eligible and relationship-ready man to whom he’s been introduced by, of all people, Henry Fogg. It’s only a step, he reminds himself. Nothing has to come of it. He only has to try.

But before he can portal to Manhattan, he has his routine tasks to tend to. He likes to leave the lab just so, everything in its place for Tuesday’s lessons. All the better to enjoy his downtime. He sips his port and arranges his antique calipers beside jars of iron ore and amethyst. It gives him a sense of satisfaction, which in turn gives him a sense of discomfort.

_Who even am I_, he thinks_._ _Pathetic._ If he entertains this particular thought, he knows he’d be opening the gate to a long list of increasingly unkind and unforgiving thoughts about himself. A very long list. The bottle of port is right there in front of him. He’s gone that route before. He’s gone worse routes than that. But he’s trying to do things differently now. Really trying. So instead, experimentally, he takes a deep breath and reflects on all the reasons he has to be grateful.

To begin with, he has a livelihood he enjoys, to his great surprise. His advanced seminar on telekinesis is a popular course, and he is a popular professor. He is popular not because he’s gentle and sympathetic toward students but because he’s not. He expects a lot from them, and that’s what they like. They watch the way he handles magic. Like it’s terrifying, and like it’s precious. Like it can break your heart. If his students learn that, they are learning the right things, and he’s grateful for that.

He has a roof over his head—a comfortable private apartment here on campus, warded to the gills and as hidden as it’s possible for a thing to be hidden from other magicians, above the psychics’ meditation lounge and with lovely views of the naturalists’ greenhouses. He has a small but elegant pied-à-terre all his own in Manhattan, near where Julia and New Penny live, near Kady’s safehouse-penthouse. He has his portal straight to Fillory, and a different portal to the Neitherlands Library, which under Alice’s leadership is an altogether different place than it was, miracle of miracles.

He has cordial relationships with colleagues here at Brakebills—warm, even. He has one or two very bright students who remind him of . . . well. They are very bright, and perhaps a bit high-strung, and he tries to do right by them.

He has magic. Steady, reliable, pure and unfiltered magic, its strength never wavering these past six years. And, more than anything, he has a purpose. His purpose is simply to use this magic, which he never for a moment forgets is his to use—everyone’s to use—because of an enormous and stupidly valiant sacrifice that, one day (_please, please_) will have been worth it. One day.

It won’t ever be, not really, but he has to pretend.

The cabinets of his lab are lined with mercury glass, and he can see his reflection bouncing back, only somewhat distorted. He likes the formality of a double-breasted vest these days, and he likes balancing out the formality with rolled-up shirtsleeves and no jacket. His hair makes him look older than he is, he knows. His students take one look at his hair and assume he must be older than their parents, _ancient_, and that’s just as well. His hair is as lush and curly as it ever was but it’s gone steel-wool gray. He’d woken up to find it utterly changed one morning and had shrugged, thinking: _This might as well happen_.

The sharp edges of his vanity have softened over the years. And, anyhow, he’s learned that having gray hair hasn’t made him less attractive. He can still get laid when the urge strikes him, which does happen. He knows where to go and how to strike up an arrangement without exchanging even a word. He avoids the men who are looking for a daddy. Other men drink him in—six foot two and fit with poreless clear skin and grey hair—and their faces cloud over with a confused combination of desire and pity. He can take or leave their pity, but he likes their confusion, he finds. He doesn’t wonder why he likes it. Nothing about _that _is a mystery.

But he’s going to go on a date. At a restaurant with tablecloths. Where he’ll have a dignified conversation with a handsome muggle who has a good job. Is he grateful for that? No. But he’s grateful to himself for trying harder, which is a recent development.

Is he happy? He’s as happy as he might have ever expected to be. So, his life isn’t the glorious hedonistic spectacle his younger self imagined blazing through on the way to an early grave. But it also isn’t huddling drunk under a Slanket on the couch, using a threadbare black hoodie as a pillow and pointing a Time Window at his own past to watch the same three or four scenes endlessly on repeat like he’s watching a YouTube channel called Chickenshit Dumbass. Most of the time, it isn’t that.

It’s part of his new plan for living, worked out with Margo’s help: dial back the Time Window—no cinnabar, not ever—and dial up the things that can constitute a relatively happy life. Start cooking again. Be outdoors, get fresh air, move his limbs. Let people be kind to him.

Just as he’s thinking of Margo—he’s often thinking of her, to be fair—a bunny drops onto the counter and demands a selfie. It doesn’t say _SELFIE_. Not exactly. _CHECK-IN TIME_ is what it says.

He complies, as always. Margo worries, and he only has himself to blame. Another reason to be grateful: even when his friends are not with him, they’re thinking of him. Or monitoring him. Whatever.

This process is a bit involved, since he can’t just text a picture to Fillory. Instead, he takes a selfie with his phone, then props the phone screen up in front of what passes for a printer-copier at Brakebills: a tank of enchanted tarantulas, who will render the image they see on paper by dipping their legs in various pigments. He fishes out the finished rendering delicately, and compliments the tarantulas, who are sensitive. He scrawls a quick note on the margin of the portrait, attaches it to a bunny using a rubber band, gives the bunny a cigarette as payment, and sends it on its way. He gives the tarantulas crickets as payment, for good measure.

Margo can somehow always tell when he’s been overdoing it with the Time Window. She can tell by his eyes, she says. She won’t see a thing now.

If he looks a little tired, it’s because he woke from a strange dream in the early pre-dawn hours and couldn’t fall back asleep. It was a sex dream about Quentin, which is a category of dream that hasn’t recurred for years. It was a new variation, too—unusually vibrant, full of heat and sweat and the sloppy wetness of Quentin’s mouth and the tangle of long hair in his hands. Eliot’s thumb stroking back along Quentin’s temple, Eliot’s voice breaking as he came into Quentin’s mouth. And he was his current self in the dream, gray hair and all, and Quentin’s eyes were . . . Quentin _saw _him, was what he felt in the dream. Really saw him. And his eyes were kind.

But he’s supposed to be moving on, after six years. Maybe the dream is part of it, part of the letting go. The bottle of port is cool between his palms. He hasn’t uncorked it. He isn’t going to. He hasn’t even finished the original portion he poured for himself.

He hears a knock on the door to his lab, and when he glances over he sees Plum Purchas poking the top of her head through. One of his private tutorial students. He stands up straight and nudges the bottle into its place next to his tinctures and extracts.

“Yes. Come in, Plum.” She’s an extraordinarily talented young magician, with all the power and discipline of Alice Quinn but with none of Alice’s reserve. Her confidence delights him, though he tries not to show it. He can’t remember ever seeing her worry her lip with her teeth, as she’s doing now. He forces himself not to frown. “Well? Come out with it.”

She takes off her wool beanie, which he can see is dotted with snowflakes. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are red beneath a frame of tidy black bangs.

“It’s my thesis project.”

“Your world. Go on.” Plum is building a world, because she can. The work is part telekinesis—both macro and micro—and part conjuring, with some theoretical illusion fundamentals underpinning it. She’s responsible, creative, disciplined. She’s been making good progress.

“Well, I accidentally broke through to a pocket universe or something. There’s a man there.”

“Ah. We talked about this as a possibility. Just apologize and brick him up again with a vector integration. He’ll remember it as a hallucination, if at all.”

She purses her lips. She knows all this.

He squares his shoulders, his senses pricking with alarm, though he can’t yet say why. “You didn’t leave it open, did you?”

“It’s just that . . . he seemed to be expecting me. He’s, like, asking for you.”

She fumbles in her satchel, mumbling, “He asked me to give you this,” and before Eliot’s brain can catch up with the rest of his body, he holds out his palm and feels his fingers close around a peach, ready to split from ripeness, heavy with juice and warmed by a hot summer sun.

#

  1. ** APRIL 2019 (SIX YEARS BEFORE TODAY)**

The moment his heart breaks, he swears he hears it more than feels it.

What he feels is nothing. Numbness. What he hears is a deafening crack.

Lying in his bed of white sheets in the Brakebills infirmary, Margo weeping silently beside him, he recalls that when he was a child in Indiana, he had a favorite tree, a Silver Maple with low, wide boughs perfect for climbing and leaves that blazed crimson red and saffron yellow in the fall. He’d always been careful not to let anyone see the depth of his love for the tree, lest he be kept from it as punishment, lest he be punished for something so _sissy_ as loving a beautiful tree. 

One night, a terrifying thunderstorm had swept across the prairie. From his hiding spot beneath a quilt, crouched between his bed and the window, he’d held his breath as a ribbon of lightning snaked down from the sky, painting the darkness and striking his tree, seemingly at random.

He’d been powerless to do anything. He’d been powerless to persuade his father to slow the flames with water—_that’s needed for the pigs, boy_—despite how he pleaded, despite all he risked by pleading. No one had stopped him when he raced out into the storm, rain-soaked pajamas clinging to his skinny legs, knees knocking, his bare feet torn by the storm-blown debris that littered the ground. The tree had burned all that night, spitting and steaming in the rain.

He remembers more than anything the sound—the roar of the flames, the whistling rush of air into crevices of wood that hadn’t seen air in hundreds of years, into the heartwood.

He remembers wondering why his mother didn’t try to comfort him all the next day, which they spent stirring the ashes of his tree into cow shit for fertilizer.

He remembers understanding for the first time that loving something in secret means, later, suffering in secret.

And he remembers the crack that started it all—earsplitting, awful, eerily crisp and sharp. 

He feels like that now. There is a before and an after. In between: a crack. 

Margo hasn’t even been able to say the words. She only opens and closes her mouth, choking on tears. Her chin trembles and dimples. Her tiny torso spasms with sobs. He’s never seen her cry like this, and what’s making her cry like this is not only a thing that happened but that she has to be the one to tell him, that at some point he has to be told, and that’s how he knows. Quentin is dead.

He puts his hand over hers and squeezes. He can suffer in secret again. He’s done it before.

#

  1. ** NOVEMBER 2021 (FOUR YEARS BEFORE TODAY)**

Eliot finally has his hands on a Time Window.

It wasn’t easy to get. He had to find a back-channel route to the Baba Yaga to trade for it, someone who doesn’t know Lovelady and who won’t let it get back to Kady or Margo or Alice or Julia or New Penny that he has this thing. He can only access its most basic functions, but even these basic functions are already like a drug he’ll never not be addicted to.

The Time Window lets him watch. It lets him watch and see for himself that all the boneheaded cock-ups he remembers were, in fact, as boneheaded and as cocked up as he believes. He can’t intervene, not without cinnabar, can’t spill his guts across the gulf of years, but he can watch his fill, or whatever you call it when there is no fill, when your appetite for pouring salt on your wounds is bottomless. All he can do is watch, mute and powerless, which is as pure a form of self-torture as he has ever known.

His friends don’t ever need to know. They think he’s handling things relatively well. They’ve got their own issues and private griefs, now that they’ve exhausted every possible route to bringing Q back. Nothing works.

From time to time, a bunny drops out of the air, saying COULD USE A LITTLE HELP HERE, and he replies THIS IS ME HELPING. Fillory is still up for grabs, apparently, but he’s worse than useless, and he knows it. Better to stay away.

The best he can do is keep Kady’s dog alive while she’s traveling the world, riding high on the surge in magic. He suspects the dog’s job is to keep _him_ alive. Sometimes he reaches for whatever is nearby that looks edible. Sometimes he spits it out when it tastes like the wrong thing. A banana tastes like spaghetti. Corn chips taste like Skittles. Leftover fried rice tastes like peaches.

The Time Window anchors him. These are the moments he revisits, his greatest hits playlist of regret and agony:

One: Saying those things to Q in the throne room. Duh. His lips move in time with his former self: _not thinking clearly . . . you aren’t . . . that’s not you . . . definitely not me . . . not when we ._ . . So many ways to say _no_.

Two: Pulling the trigger in Castle Blackspire. Hearing Q shout with conviction and anger—_Eliot! No!_—and doing it anyways. Dooming one person, it turned out. Dooming Quentin.

Three: Before that, when Q described his deal with Ora, hearing Q say: _The only way to do this is the hard way. Sometimes the quest is like that_. Q had looked right at him, daring him to disagree. He sees that now. He should have said, back then: _Fifty years?_ _That wasn’t hard, Q._ _Hard isn’t what the quest wants._ Instead he’d only blinked, thinking, believing: _Of course the mosaic cottage was a prison to him. What’s another few centuries?_

His failures are perfect, he realizes. In these three failures—in his own actions—he can locate the source of the pain he feels now, and by locating the source of his pain he can both contain it and amplify it. It isn’t a recipe for healthy living, but it gives him a thing to do.

In secret, for weeks on end, he watches, and watches, and watches.

When he can’t stand to watch anymore, but can’t seem to stop, either, he starts to drink.

#

  1. ** NOVEMBER 2023 (TWO YEARS BEFORE TODAY)**

Eliot sits in a polished wooden chair in Henry Fogg’s office. It’s the same polished wooden chair in which he’d sat on that first long-ago day, the day he was offered admission to Brakebills, and in which he’d breezily signed a waiver saying he understood spellwork was not unlikely to kill him.

It’s the same polished wooden chair in which he’d sat on a different day and admitted to Fogg that he’d expected, when diving headfirst into a world he knew nothing about, to die.

He feels no further from death today, but also no closer. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t give any thought at all to such matters. A cocktail of street drugs, booze, prescriptions, and self-administered enchantments keeps him numb. At the moment, if he’s feeling just the slightest bit out of sorts, it’s because when he vomited up a handful of cinnabar on the previous day—or was it two days prior?—his Xanax had come with it, and then he’d messed up his window for taking a replacement dose because Kady’s dog had started licking up the cinnabar and he’d vomited again, this time on the dog, and by the time he was done making the dog vomit the cinnabar it had eaten—cinnabar is poison to dogs as well as to people—and bathing the dog, and he’d realized he was wet enough that he might as well take a shower himself, and finding clean clothes had been a whole thing. Not to mention he’d found a mostly-full bottle of absinthe behind to the shampoo in the shower. And then it was time for his replacement Xanax and also his new Xanax. He’d fallen asleep after that, maybe?

He’s not sure, either, why he agreed to this appointment with Henry. His calendar was open, he thinks, snorting to himself. It always is.

It occurs to him, too, that there might be a stash of cinnabar here on campus, maybe in one of Henry’s locked desk drawers. He’s sure he can access it, even as clouded as he is. It’s interesting to have a goal.

He wants the cinnabar because with cinnabar he can use the Time Window like Facetime. Instead of just watching certain badly handled conversations unfold, he can finally say what he should have said in that throne room all those months . . . years . . . however long ago it was. He doesn’t care if he creates a paradox or a fissure in time or whatever it is they say happens, because nothing that might happen could be worse. Not compared to what did happen.

He registers that Henry is in the room now, shuffling a stack of folders on his desk. Eliot picks up his head. He sniffs the air.

“Does it smell like peaches in here?” Eliot asks, something pricking at the edges of his consciousness. “Were you burning a candle just now? Or am I having a stroke?”

Henry continues rifling through his pile of papers while looking Eliot over critically. “Does what smell like what?”

“Peaches.”

“Plum!” Henry raises his chin and appears to shout at the ceiling.

“What the—“ Eliot widens his eyes at Henry, tries to focus. If this is some sort of spectral possession situation, he is not in a state to handle it. Under his breath, he whispers, “Peaches.”

“PLUM!” Then, to Eliot: “What?”

“What,” Eliot says. He composes his face and nods solemnly, because that’s what he does instinctively when an authority figure looks at him. Henry is still an authority figure, he’s pretty sure.

A young woman bounds into the room, her black hair cut into short bob like in sepia portraits of 1920s flappers. She’s wearing denim overalls over a tank top.

“Plum, meet Mr. Waugh,” Henry says.

“Oh,” Eliot says, “You’re a person.” He rises out of his chair the minimum number of inches necessary to count as standing while he shakes her hand. Shaking hands is not done while sitting, not ever, no matter how thick a cloud of inebriates one is nestled in.

“A person named Plum,” he continues. 

“You’re quick,” she says. She winces at the way his breath smells.

Henry clears his throat. “Mr. Waugh could use some coffee. Do you think you could locate him a nice hot cup of Kopi Luwak?”

Eliot blinks. “Black,” he says, his voice a quiet squeak. He’s not sure what’s going on, and for once he thinks he really ought to be following along.

Plum stares at him for a moment, then closes her eyes, performs a series of tuts, and chants Sumatran mantra. _A sumantra_, he thinks. The girl reaches her hand into Henry’s cigar humidor and pulls out a steaming stoneware cup of coffee.

“Okay,” Eliot says. It feels nice in his hand. Warm.

“As you may know,” Henry says, “Kopi Luwak is sourced from the island of Bali, where the raw beans are eaten and then pooped out by wild civet cats before being roasted and brewed. It’s a fairly rare delicacy. And this comes straight from the source.”

Eliot sips the coffee, which has a unique earthy flavor. At least he’s stopped smelling peaches. “And?”

“Plum here just combined telekinesis and quaeromancy to locate and summon this coffee, then conjured a temporary micro-portal to have it delivered to you.”

“Thanks,” Eliot says. “Cool.”

“That’ll be all, Plum. Thank you.”

She leaves the room, closing the heavy mahogany door behind her.

“She’s a first-year. And she needs a teacher, Eliot. She came here knowing how to do all of that. It’s only the beginning of what she can do.”

“Oh,” Eliot says. “Hmm.”

“Eliot,” Henry says, “you don’t need to be sober to be on the Brakebills faculty, but you can’t be totally wasted.”

“Okay?” He blinks several times in a row now. This is turning out to be a very informational visit to Henry’s office. Both baffling and informational.

“That’s not why you’re here?” Henry picks up one of the folders from his desk, and there’s that scent of peaches again.

Eliot simply stares.

“You didn’t send me this dossier and your CV?”

“I don’t have a CV.” He’s sure about this, at least.

Henry flips through the pages. “Well, someone decided to get the ball rolling on your behalf.”

“Margo,” Eliot whispers. It can only be Margo.

“I don’t actually need all this to tell me you’d be a smart addition to our faculty,” Henry says. “I already know it. You’re extremely gifted. You know how to explain things to people less skilled than you, because you’ve been doing it all your life. And you know all the shortcuts.”

“Because I’m lazy.”

“Because you’re impatient.” Henry has moved around to the front of his desk by now, and he leans back against it, folding his arms. “And you can pick out a fuck-up.”

“Takes one to know one.”

Henry looks down at his polished wing-tips and is quiet for a moment. When he finally speaks, Eliot hears a gentleness in his voice he hasn’t heard before. “We all lost him. But you—you didn’t just lose him. It’s worse. You lost him while owing him a debt.”

“How do you mean?”

“That you’re alive because of him. You, more than anyone, know how . . . er, how rare it is for a person whose body is being used for evil to . . . to not be killed.”

They’ve never talked about this. Mike, under mind control.

“You mean I know how easy it is to do the killing,” Eliot says. “Very. Very easy.”

“I don’t think for a minute that it was easy. But you were backed into a corner and you did the only thing you could do, regardless of what that choice would do to you.”

Eliot finds he can’t speak about this. Mike under mind control was a threat to Fogg, to others, just as Eliot himself was a threat while he was possessed. And Mike is dead, and Eliot isn’t. And Quentin is dead, and Eliot isn’t. And nothing means anything.

“A lot of people knew the monster had to be stopped. A lot of people thought you couldn’t be saved. That you were already dead, even. But Quentin fought for you, for months on end. And you never got to repay him. You never got to thank him, even. That’s a hard turn of events to swallow.”

There’s more to it than this, but Eliot can only nod, eyes downcast.

“He didn’t do it because he wanted one day to be repaid, Eliot. He did it because he loved you. And that person who he loved is still who you are. I believe that.”

He feels a shift in the air that means Henry has opened a window, and he rises to a wobbly standing position so he can move himself near the breeze. He stands there looking out at the lawn, listening.

“Eliot, I want you to answer me honestly. You can say no. Are you a magician?”

The rest of what Henry is insinuating goes unspoken. If the answer is no, he can have his memories amputated. He can have a replacement persona grafted to this husk. He considers this for a moment. He’d lose Margo, and she would lose him. Such as he is. What is he, he wonders? _Is _he a magician?

Through the open window, he sees a heavy branch hanging low in the path of two students who are walking while poppering, so engrossed that they don’t see what’s in front of their faces. He reaches for his telekinesis, and nudges the branch upward and out of their way before they can smack into it.

He sighs and turns around again to look at Henry, who has just seen his answer. Yes, he’s a magician. He’s just lucid enough to know that a hell of a life preserver is being thrown to him, and if he doesn’t grab ahold of it, he will die.

“You’ve been on, what, a two-year bender?” Henry says. He reaches for his rolodex. “Let’s say six weeks of rehab—I know a good place—then I’ll see you here at the start of the Spring term.”

#

  1. ** OCTOBER 2025 (TWO WEEKS BEFORE TODAY)**

Eliot stands at the window of his faculty apartment and looks down through the glass ceiling of the naturalists’ greenhouse. The bright light of the full moon was what woke him up, and recalling that the light of a full moon makes diamondflies luminescent was what brought him to the window. Sure enough, the winged creatures in the greenhouse below glow and undulate, flitting from flower to flower. It’s beautiful until he remembers that, removed from their queen, these diamondflies will never see the answering signal they’re looking for. They’ll keep trying forever.

He tells himself he wants fresh air, which is how he finds himself walking the damp and loamy path to the experimental orchards, his scarf whipping about in the chill late-autumn air.

Earlier in the week, when Eliot had unlocked his lab after a late breakfast, the aroma of peaches had hit him like a knife to the heart. He’d clenched his jaw before raising his eyes to the granite lab bench where pranksters had been leaving the fruit. It was nonsensical, as pranks went: not funny, not elaborate, not even cruel in a way that was commonly understood. No one knew what peaches meant to him. What they had once meant. But it kept happening.

This time he’d found not just one peach but a trio of them still attached to a fairly thick branch. The cut was fresh, the flat disc of exposed pith still green and spongy. That meant it had to have come from a local tree.

He’d summoned Plum and coolly asked her to look for a tree in the orchard that had been recently pruned, and to scrape it for signatures, magical fingerprints. He wanted to know who was doing this to him.

She’d come back to him saying she couldn’t find anything, all the trees were intact, and with a naturalist in tow, a kid called Wharton who had pitted out his uniform shirt. The whole tableau only added to Eliot’s irritation.

“We’re pruning next week, sir,” Wharton tried to explain, pushing his sweaty hair back from his face. “We haven’t started yet.”

“Well, then, do something with this.” He’d shoved the branch at the boy, wanting to be rid of it. “Graft it to an apricot tree.”

“But—grafting is done in the Spring, Professor Waugh.”

“When trees are budding, I know.” He’d been flustered. The combination of the sickly sweet peach, this unexpected foray into farming techniques, and the boy’s B.O. had put him over the edge, and he’d practically growled. “I don’t care what season it is. You’re a magician. Make it work.”

Thinking back on it now, he feels badly about the way he spoke to the boy. He approaches the orchard intending to do some touch-ups on whatever spells Wharton had used for the graft, setting the kid up for success as well as possible.

But when he inspects the spellwork, he finds it impeccably done. A micro-climate has been installed around the tree with its new graft, like a virtual bell jar within which it’s the middle of spring. Wharton has used one spell to rewind the progression of the apricot tree—the rootstock—back to its budding stage, and another spell to accelerate the progression of the peach bough—the scion—forward to _its _budding stage, but without losing the fruit that still hangs ripe on the branch. The joinery is as fine as anything a third-generation farmer might have done. There is nothing more for him to do. The graft will take.

When he holds his lens up to inspect the tree, he can see it practically humming with satisfaction, life coursing through it from root to outermost leaf. He sees more layers of spellwork, clean and graceful. Subtle enchantments against grubs and the like. And something else: someone has put an eavesdropping spell on this portion of the orchard. He casts a playback counter-spell and hears Wharton’s voice low but clear and, less distinct, the voice of another man. Wharton’s boyfriend, he thinks. That Greek kid.

_Be careful. It’s for Professor Waugh. He never assigns busy work, so it must be important to him, don’t you think? _

_Do we calculate for spring circumstances, or for fall? _

_Whatever you do, save the fruit. Vögel’s Bypass? Should do the trick._

_He seemed a little, I don’t know. Down. More so than usual. _

_Did you get the Epsom salts? Good. It makes the fruit sweeter. _

_No, I don’t know what it means to him. I just know it means something. _

_Can we eat one of these? Man, they look good, and I missed dinner. _

_Better not. _

_Can you reapply that grafting tape? Gently. Okay. I think this will work. _

_It looks nice. But damn, Whart, you could use a shower. _

_Oh, fuck off. _

He leans against the tree, surprised to feel a lump in his throat. It’s just a stupid tree, and a fruit he can’t eat.

No. That’s not true. It isn’t that he can’t eat it. He just won’t. He doesn’t.

There’s a certain peach he remembers eating, long ago, and the way it made him feel: insatiable, overwhelmed, overflowing with . . . well. Then there’s a peach he remembers deliberately not eating, denying himself despite the way his mouth watered, the way his fractured, half-dead heart cried out for it, before tossing it into the fire in a ceremony that couldn’t be real, but was. He didn’t take a bite then, and he hasn’t since.

There in the moonlight, Eliot thinks about the way his students regard him, the person they see beneath the surface. He thinks about their kindness toward him when they didn’t think they were being overheard, about a thing they didn’t even understand. Not _He’s close to Dean Fogg, better impress him. _Not _Fucking prick, I should graft his dick to his hand, save him the bother. _Just: _It must be important to him_. When was the last time he treated himself with such kindness?

He realizes all at once that he doesn’t want to carry around this heavy cloak of mourning anymore, this bell jar of his own making where it’s always winter, always miserable. He wants to set it down. He wants to hold his head up. He wants Margo to stop needing to check in on him. He wants to use magic to make his own life easier, for once, not harder. He wants to _feel_. It might be a betrayal, even after all this time, but he wants to live.

He presses his palm into the bark of the tree, feels the rough texture anchoring him.

“I’m sorry,” he says out loud to no one visible, his voice splintering. “But I have to be whole again. Somehow. Some way.”

He plucks a peach from the branch and brings it to his mouth. He devours the peach in three ungainly huge bites. His knees give way, and his body collapses to the damp and cold ground as he lets go of some invisible weight, and his breath leaves him in a sob.

This time, there’s no flood of déjà vu, no wave of sense-memory dragging him into a _sort of beautiful _world, a life where he loved and was loved more richly, more sweetly than any person had a right to expect.

None of that.

This time, it’s just fruit, simple and good, and he is just a man who is alive and alone. 

In the morning, he portals to Margo. He starts from the beginning, and he tells her everything. Shows her his broken heart and asks her what to do. _How do I move on?_ he asks. _I need help._

#

  1. ** NOVEMBER 2025 (TODAY)**

His first instinct is to lash out at Plum. He’d been doing so well, and now this fuckery.

“Is this your idea of a joke?” He cradles the peach like it’s a grenade, placing it on the countertop gingerly and stumbling backward, away from it, away from Plum. “It’s been you this whole time? Of all people, Plum. You’re better than this.”

“No, it’s not, I swear. People say you hate peaches, but no one knows why. Professor Waugh, I don’t think this is a prank.” She looks genuinely anguished, which irritates him more, for some reason.

“Well, somebody conjured something and now you’re mixed up in it. You need to show better judgment. Did you even use your lens?”

“The lens works in my world, but not in . . . whatever I broke through to.” She glances at the peach, which is now leaking juice onto the counter. “And I didn’t choose this. He gave it to me. I don’t know anything about it, I swear.”

“Did it follow you in? The vision—do you see it now?”

“It was a man, and he stayed where he was. He said he’d wait.”

Eliot clenches his jaw. He’ll deal with this. At the very least, he’ll need to follow the incursion protocol. “Where?”

He knows the door to her world is hidden behind the Senior Common Room. The rest she sketches out for him on a torn piece of graph paper.

“Stay here,” he says. “If anything happens to me, deny everything, or you’ll get expelled. You’re too good a magician for that.”

He stalks off, leaving her to monitor the peach in case it’s enchanted.

As he makes his way through Plum’s world, he seethes. He’s angry with himself, more than anything. He never should have allowed a student to attempt such a project. She could have been seriously hurt.

He can see the breach from several yards away. Some approximation of sunlight spills out of an area that he would call a hole in the wall, except it’s more of a hole in the air. He takes a deep breath, ignoring the whiff of rosemary and honeysuckle that pricks a far-removed part of his brain, and steps through the shimmering disc.

His heart thuds.

Plum was right. Standing there in the sunshine is a man. He’s got his arms crossed, hair in a long ponytail, feet bare. Under his feet is a lush green lawn dotted with wildflowers. The lawn fills an enclosure that might have once held a mosaic, if he can trust memories that feel both vague and distant. The man’s eyes are—The man’s eyes—

Eliot opens and closes his mouth.

“Quentin,” he says. To Quentin. _To Quentin._ His throat is bone dry. “Am I dead?”

“I don’t think so,” Quentin says. _Quentin says._

_Is that how his voice sounds?_ Eliot thinks. _It’s been so long._ He feels dizzy.

“Well, then, am I hallucinating?”

“If you were . . . “

“Shut it, Coldwater.” He’s shaking, hysterical noises bubbling out of his chest. “What is this? Before I lose my sanity. Whatever’s left of my sanity.”

“This is my afterlife,” Quentin says. “At least, it started out that way. The train from the underworld brought me here, and I can still do magic, so I’ve been . . . working on some things.”

“You fixed the place up.”

“That’s part of it.” Quentin uncrosses his arms, drops them to his sides. “Eliot,” he says, rough and low. “I miss you so much. Won’t you touch me?”

But Eliot can’t move. His feet are cemented to the ground. “I’m afraid to,” he manages, his voice a chalky whisper. “I’m afraid you won’t be real. I’m afraid you’re a ghost.”

“I know,” Quentin says, moving gradually closer. “Just try.”

Eliot stares, trying to manage his breathing.

“Don’t move,” he says. He lifts his trembling hand and brushes his fingers—_brushes his fingers_—across Quentin’s jaw, which is real. The hot breath that rushes out of Quentin’s lungs is real, and his eyelids fluttering closed are real.

“No,” Eliot says, panic spiking. “Open your eyes.”

Quentin’s eyelids fly open again and Eliot stares and stares. He strokes his hands into Quentin’s hair, along his temples beading with sweat, around the back of his neck, hot and flushed. He’s still quivering. “I . . . I . . .”

“I know you do,” Quentin says. He grips Eliot’s wrists, tight tight tight, and tips himself closer.

Eliot closes the distance and lets his lips find Quentin’s, soft and warm, eager, a home that’s been missing from him for years, a home he’s never allowed himself to have in all his life. A moan escapes him, so loud he feels it in his teeth. And then he’s kissing Quentin, and being kissed, hard and feverish, and he remembers: oh. _This._ A nameless this, not like anything else. _This_ is real.

His legs turn to jelly under him and he eases them both to the soft, grassy ground. He should be embarrassed by the urgency of his need, how frantic he is, but he can’t be bothered. Quentin’s linen garments peel away easily, but his own stupid layers take more time, and he registers vaguely that a button or two fly away into the tall wildflowers. All he cares about is skin against skin, and then he’s there, Quentin warm and solid and slick beneath him, rutting back, just as desperate.

That edge of Quentin’s collarbone, he’d forgotten. The vein there on his neck, under his jaw. The curl of his ear. The noise Quentin makes when he feels Eliot’s fingers dragging his scalp, a whimper. The strength of Quentin’s arms around him. Quentin’s cock, hard and needy, slipping against the skin of his abdomen, his own aching cock. Quentin’s eyes, locking in.

_“Can I just—I’m so close—I want—”_

_“Yes—God, yes—” _

He reaches his hand down and tightens it around the both of them, feeling electrified, feeling a blinding orgasm gathering, a thing that will short out his every nerve ending. He flicks his head to clear sweat from his eyes. He needs to look Quentin in the eye and bear witness to the light in his eyes, the light, _the light_. He feels his jaw drop open as he comes, disbelieving still, for years now a stranger to this way of being in his body. Quentin grips him tighter still, saying _stay with me_, gasping as he comes pulsing against Eliot. Eliot presses his mouth to the pulse in Quentin’s neck, feeling a code in his tongue: _alive, alive, alive._

Afterward, he gathers Quentin close and shudders, senseless and spent. One of them is still trembling, or possibly they both are.

“So, just your basic bridge from the afterlife to earth. That’s all,” he says, as he catches his breath. He cups his palm around Quentin’s shoulder, which was wooden once, and feels like flesh again.

“Not _the_ afterlife, just _my_ afterlife. I think it’s a pretty limited-access bridge. This is not a dawn of the dead scenario.”

“Still seems pretty groundbreaking.”

“Badum-tsh.”

“Do not comic rimshot this moment. You brought yourself back from the dead. Just, like, bask for a minute.”

“Well, I _am _a fucking magician. I had to try.”

Eliot tightens his arms around Quentin just to make sure, once again, that he can. He can feel Quentin’s heart beating in his ribcage. He strokes his hand up and down Quentin’s back.

“Anyhow, it wasn’t all me. Something put me here, gave me magic to use.”

Eliot hums and rakes his fingers through Quentin’s hair.

“Have you been building this bridge all this time?”

“Actually, no. That part only took me two weeks. For a long time, I just thought this was it. This was my last stop. All I had to do was wait for you.”

Eliot’s heart rushes in his ears, just for a moment. He’d imagined that, too, in the early days. For a brief period when fantasizing was a thing he did.

“Me? You knew?”

“This is our cottage, El. When I found myself here, I knew. And, at first, I spent my time sprucing up the garden and making the place nice.”

Eliot thinks: I could live here forever. If he’s here, I’m here. He thinks this while kissing Quentin, while rolling himself onto his back and pulling Quentin on top of him, stroking his hair back, kissing and kissing him. When it’s time for a break, Quentin carries on where he left off. Eliot can feel Quentin stroking his chest while he speaks, fingertips ruffling his chest hair, and it feels good.

“Then I realized I was attuned to you somehow, and you weren’t okay. And I figured out that I could meddle. So I did.”

Eliot thinks of Margo, and Plum. Will they be okay, if he stays here? Will he be able to meddle with them, to keep them strong?

“Wait, did your spellwork smell like peaches? Did you put those peaches in my lab?”

“That was all you. You materialized them every time. You did it subconsciously, though I think it was because you were sensing me somehow. That’s my best theory.”

“I would have helped you. We all would have. We tried so many ways to bring you back.”

“That wasn’t the point, though. I never thought it would’ve been possible, and so I was only focused on your heart. It only occurred to me recently to try for this bridge.”

“What was it about my heart?”

He doesn’t really need Quentin to explain. He felt it when the salvageable parts of his heart knit themselves together. Or were knit together. But he listens, because he wants to hear Quentin say it.

“I could sense that it was . . . you know. Broken. I thought I might be able to wake it up. Remind it what it used to be.”

Eliot turns onto his side and props his head up on his elbow, looks at Quentin.

“I just didn’t think about the part where waking up your heart meant—I mean, you were moving on. That was the whole goal. But, you know, I love you. I didn’t want to see you move on to someone new.”

God, that little eyebrow raise. The way Quentin widens his eyes when he’s appalled at himself, or feeling something intense, or both. He kisses Quentin again, and again. “So you built the bridge.”

“I figured out a way to cheat. I kind of got Plum to help me, without her realizing it.”

“Q—were you mind-controlling Plum?”

“I just gave her suggestions. I made it easy for her build her way toward me. I put things in the path of her quaeromancy.”

“I supposed I should tell her I’m okay at some point. Unless—not that it matters, because I can make this my new bedroom if I need to, but can you go through?”

“You know what?” Quentin takes Eliot’s hand. “There’s only one way to find out.”

#

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr as OrchardsinSnow, always on the hunt for inspiration, come say hi there! Leave me a note below if you have a moment.


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